.
Gambetta's absurd Government of the National Defence, even in that
supreme moment of danger when the Uhlans were hunting it from pillar to
post, actually compelled the Princes of the House of France to fight for
their country under assumed names, but it could not prevent the sons of
all the historic families of France from risking their lives against the
public enemy. All over France a general impulse of public confidence put
the French Conservatives forward as the men in whose hands the
reconstitution of the shattered nation would be safest. The popular
instinct was justified by the result.

From 1871 to 1877, France was governed, under the form of a republic, by
a majority of men who neither had, nor professed to have, any more
confidence in the stability of a republican form of government, than
Alexander Hamilton had in the working value of the American Constitution
which he so largely helped to frame, and which he accepted as being the
best it was possible in the circumstances to get. But they did their
duty to France, as he did his duty to America. To them--first under M.
Thiers, and then under the Marechal-Duc de Magenta--France is indebted
for the reconstruction of her beaten and disorganised army, for the
successful liquidation of the tremendous war-indemnity imposed upon her
by victorious Germany, for the re-establishment of her public credit,
and for such an administration of her national finances as enabled her,
in 1876, to raise a revenue of nearly a thousand millions of francs, or
forty millions of pounds sterling, in excess of the revenue raised under
the Empire seven years before, without friction and without undue
pressure. In 1869, the Empire had raised a revenue of 1,621,390,248
francs. In 1876, the Conservative Republic raised a revenue of
2,570,505,513 francs. With this it covered all the cost of the public
service, carried the charges resulting from the war and its
consequences, set apart 204,000,000 francs for public works, and yet
left in the Treasury a balance of 98,000,000 francs.

It is told of one of the finance ministers of the Restoration, Baron
Louis, that when a deputy questioned him once about the finances, he
replied, 'Do you give us good politics and I will give you good
finances.' It seems to me that the budget of 1876 proves the politics of
the Conservative majority in the French Parliament of that time to have
been good. The Marechal-Duc de Magenta was then president. M. Thiers ha